Vehicle owners occasionally have problems with their vehicles that can be resolved by a visit to a vehicle service center. There, a vehicle technician can listen to vehicle owners explain the symptoms of the problem, observe the problem themselves, diagnose the cause of the problem, and provide a solution. As part of maintaining a record of service for a vehicle, the vehicle technician generally writes down the part(s) of the vehicle affected by the problem, the symptom(s) of the problem the vehicle owner or technician observed, and the action(s) taken to resolve the problem in a vehicle diagnostic record.
Apart from providing a record of vehicle service, the vehicle diagnostic records for a large number of serviced vehicles can be used to gather information about vehicle operation and/or service for a fleet of vehicles. However, as both the number of vehicles and the geographic area where the vehicles are used increases, so too does the complexity of analyzing the vehicle diagnostic records for those vehicles. For example, a particular vehicle model may be deployed in a large area encompassing different countries where vehicle technicians speak different languages. That is, one country may have vehicle technicians that speak different languages or the vehicle may be sold in different countries each of which has its own language. The vehicle technicians servicing the same model vehicle over a large geographic area may create vehicle diagnostic records in different languages. When the vehicle diagnostic records are received in different languages, human operators competent in a particular language analyze the content of the vehicle diagnostic records written in that language and determine what the records say.
But this can create a number of problems. Relying on human interpretation and translation of words or sentences can introduce unwanted error into the analysis of the vehicle diagnostic records. Translated diagnostic records tend to miss out on the original structure and semantics of a language, which makes it difficult to interpret the records. That is, different human operators can interpret the same vehicle diagnostic record in different ways. These variable interpretations add undesirable uncertainty to the analysis of the vehicle diagnostic records. Also, the use of human translators to initially translate data can result in inefficiencies when processing large amounts of vehicle diagnostic records. And the words or sentences included in the vehicle diagnostic record may convey different information depending on the language. Thus, it would be helpful to process vehicle diagnostic records for a fleet of vehicles in a way that identifies words or sentences without regard for the language in which the vehicle diagnostic records are maintained.